Week 10

Barchart of distribution of Keys

  • In most years the key C# is used most for both the Billboard and TikTok corpus and D# is used the least overall.
  • For Billboard songs, the key C or C# is always the most used in the last five years. TikTok songs only divert from this trend in the last year, with B being the most used key in the year 2022.
  • Notable is that the key A is used almost twice as much in TikTok songs in the last two years.
  • The key G was only more common in Billboard songs than in TikTok songs in the year 2020, the opposite is true for G# in the year 2021.
  • Overall, although there are a lot of differences, there is not a clear trend that distinguishes the keys used in TikTok and Billboard songs.

Chordogram

  • For the Chordogram I have used the song Monkeys Spinning Monkeys. Although it may not sound familiar, I think anyone who has used social media in the past 5 years will recognize this sound. It is a typical TikTok background sound that is ideal for a video in which you don’t want the sound taking up all the attention.
  • In the beginning two parts are repeated (the two mainly yellow blocks), which are clearly written in C-major. Then the big block around 60 seconds is where a modulation sets in. The same part that was repeated earlier is again repeated but now in G major.

Introduction

Introduction

TikTok is one of the most popular social media apps of today and had a big impact on how we navigate our online life and also on music.

In this dashboard I will visualize how music changed as TikTok got more popular. My corpus contains Billboard Year-End Hottest Singles from 2018 until 2022 and the most popular TikTok sounds per year. I would like to research three things:

  1. What characterizes a TikTok song.
  2. To what extent popular music and TikTok music are similar.
  3. How TikTok music differs from popular music.

A noteworthy example I would like to research is the song ’Running up the Hills” by Kate Bush, a song originally from the 1980’s, that was repopularized by the series Stranger Things and Tiktok, does that fit in with the overall trend?

Spotify

My data

Column

My data

For my datasets I have used the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of the years 2016 to 2022 for the popular songs. For the TikTok charts I have used the website https://tokboard.com and the datasets of the user Sveta151 on kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/sveta151).

For the popular songs I have used the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of each year. Each playlist contains a 100 singles, so in total my corpus contains 500 ‘popular’ songs.

For the TikTok data this is a bit more complicated. I could not find a lot of reliable sources for what sounds were the most popular per year or per month. From september 2018 to june 2021 I found the website https://tokboard.com. The 100 most popular sound were shown per month and I added all sounds that were songs to the corpus. There was no data after june 2021, so I complemented the tokboard-data with a dataset I found on kaggle by the user Sveta151 (https://www.kaggle.com/sveta151). For the previous years her data was quite similar to mine, so I complemented the years 2021 and 2022 with her playlists.

To finish it off, to get a more coherent view of TikTok and popular songs, I deleted all songs in the TikTok dataframe that were also present in the Billboard dataframe. In this way, songs that got popular on TikTok because they were already popular will not show in the visualizations.

Songs per type

We can see that the amount of songs per type is not equally distributed, with the Billboard containing 100 songs per year, every year and TikTok containing in between 76 and 357 songs per year. I have made sure that the songs are as representable as possible for each type and year, so for now I don’t forsee big problems resulting from this inequality.

Energy and Popularity in 2022

As expected we can see that the Billboard songs are more popular on average than the TikTok songs. When we look at danceability we can see the a very similar distribution for the more popular songs for the Billboard as well as the TikTok plot. But for the less popular TikTok songs, the energy seems to be higher on average.

Speechiness and tempo

For the speechiness and tempo we can see that these are pretty equally distributed among the two different types. TikTok seems to have a slightly bigger distribution, but that is mostly because TikTok has almost three times as many data points, so that can probably be attributed to that.

Distributions of dataset

Songs per type

Energy and Popularity in 2022

Speechiness and Tempo

Chromagrams

Running up that Hill Chromagram

Explanation

  • I’m not yet sure what I could say with a chromagram, but a lot of C’s on this one.

Songs are getting shorter

Danceability

Danceability seems to follow a trend in both the TikTok and the Billboard chart

  • We can see that the mean danceability is higher for popular TikTok songs than for songs that were in the Billboard Hot 100.
  • It is also notable that the trend in the last three years are very similar for both chart-types.
  • This last point can be contributed to the fact that TikTok gained the most popularity in 2020 and it could be said that popular music and TikTok trends had a bigger influence on each other.

Conclusion

Conclusion. TikTok has an effect on music.